This happened on January 18 2010. If you view the video below and use the links to look for these image files on NASA’s Stereo satellites (Sun orbiting satellites, one in front of the sun and the other behind the sun, the part we can’t see, aptly called Ahead and Behind) you’ll find that either you can’t access these files at all, or, the files are there but have been poorly retouched to remove or pixelate the objects that this video depicts, since January 18th.

NASA has responded to say that the images have probably been affected by charged particles which have caused the images to be damaged (otherwise known as digital artifacts). This would be all fine and dandy as an excuse, but if the image camera CCD had been damaged by charged particles then the image sensor area should depict the same artifact in the exact same spot in each subsequent frame! I don’t buy their excuse. Otherwise why would they remove access to these files at all? This is going to be the year of disclosure, no question. Now I must mention that the Russian Sun satellite, Coronas-Foton, went dead, they think permanently, on January 18. Coincidence? Source for the Russian info, Pravda.

Normally, we get most of each day covered by the near realtime, beacon mode data through the help of a variety of ground stations around the world (including some operated by radio amateurs):

so we have prompt information when space weather events have originated at the Sun. The full-resolution playback telemetry comes from dedicated periods of downlink (“station contacts”) through NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). A single playback can last hours, and covers data from a day or more stored on one of the two spacecrafts’ solid state recorders. Those data are then played back over the Internet to the mission operations center and the STEREO science center, and thence to the instrument teams’ home institutions, where they are processed over the course of a day or so. Thus, in normal operations, the full-resolution images will be ~ three days behind real time. Newer images will be the lower-res, more highly compressed beacon mode images, and older images will have been replaced by the full-res, playback data.

On January 18, at ~ 21:47 UT, the “central data recorder” at DSN, that stores all the playback data from all the missions DSN supports, failed. A backup CDR took over, but apparently started working on data from January 10, instead of just the four previous hours, as designed. (The last I heard, the DSN engineers don’t understand why, but it certainly sounds like a software issue.) For some reason, DSN is unable to reset a pointer and say, please start processing from this time instead of that time. So we, and all the other missions supported by DSN, are waiting for our playback data from January 18 and all following days. As soon as we get it, and the instrument teams have reformatted the telemetry into scientifically useful formats (that allow, for instance, making SECCHI EUVI data into images), we will post the images and other STEREO browse data in the normal places.

And no, I don’t know why DSN designed such an inflexible CDR system. I suspect they may modify it after this experience.

Best,

Joe Gurman

(Dr.) Joseph B. Gurman
STEREO Project Scientist”

I’ll be keeping an eye on this one and post updates as they become available.